Tag Archives: HIV/AIDSdenialism

I have picked apart the flawed claims made by the HIV/AIDS denialist Henry Bauer a fewtimes before and found them wanting, basically rehashing the same old debunked canards that denialists have repeated to themselves and anyone who wants to listen for decades. However, a recent blog entry by Bauer called Evidence-based medicine: No HIV/AIDS epidemic was so full of mind-numbing falsehoods and error that I just had to write a refutation.

So once more unto the breach…

The scientific evidence supports HIV as the cause of AIDS

—> Not only does Bauer think that there is no evidence that HIV causes AIDS, he also thinks that the evidence is stacked against this model. What is more, despite the fact that HIV has been isolated and probably visualized with electron microscopy, he actively believes that HIV as a virus does not even exist.

—> Nothing can be proven with absolute mathematical certainty in science, but a strong case can be made if multiple, independent lines of evidence all converge on the same general conclusion. This is what we find for the model that HIV causes AIDS.

—> The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases lists a lot of this evidence, including established epidemiological association, isolation, transmission pathogenesis, infection by HIV as a uniquely strong predictor for development of AIDS, the vast majority of AIDS-defining illnesses occur in patients with HIV, death rates are higher among HIV+ individuals than HIV- ones, HIV can be detected in AIDS patients, correlation between high HIV virus, viral antigens and viral genetic material one the one hand and increase risk of developing AIDS, efficacy of ARVs specific for blocking HIV replication improves prognosis for HIV patients, individuals with a lower viral load as a result of medication are less likely to progress to full-blown AIDS, AIDS patients have HIV antibodies, low prevalence of HIV antibodies correlate with extreme rarity of AIDS, HIV is similar to other viruses of the same type that causes immunodeficiency in their natural hosts etc. (NIAID, 2010)

—> None of these findings mathematically prove that HIV must cause AIDS, but the combined weight of the independent evidence strongly favors it. Those that reject the scientific conclusion that HIV causes AIDS must not just rationalize away each piece of evidence, but they must find another model on which the evidence is more likely.

—> The bottom line is that the HIV causes AIDS model predicts the evidence with a much higher probability than the notion that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Drop in lifespan reveals the severe impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic

—> Bauer repeats the old canard that HIV/AIDS is not an epidemic since the population growth in certain African countries are positive.

—> This is a flawed argument, because high birthrates compensates. The severe impact of HIV/AIDS can be seen by looking at changes in average lifespan over time. As discussed in a previous blog entry, Kalichman (2009, pp. 77-78) points out that countries in southern Africa, including South Africa, have seen a massive decrease in life expectancy over the years that correspond to the occurrence of AIDS pandemic. He writes that: “Life expectancy in many countries that were improving during the post-colonial years of the 1960s and 1907s began to erode in the 1980s and 1990s, and life expectancy in many countries is now worse than even during the 1950s, the last full decade of colonialism. The reason why some countries afflicted by AIDS sustain positive population growth is simply due to high birth rates.”

Failure to provide ARVs South Africans caused 340000 deaths

––> Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health concludes in Chigwedere et. al. (2008) that over 330000 individuals with HIV/AIDS died earlier than needed because the previous President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, and his government refused to let his people have access to antiretrovirals. They believed that it was just a western pharmaceutical plot to destroy the future of the country and instead, he suggested garlic and lemon as treatment (Kalichman, 2009). How can Henry Bauer claim that there is no HIV epidemic? Read more of this post

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Debunking Denialism

Modern life presents us with an apparent paradox: science has a strong cultural authority, yet primitive darkness is coming back in the shape of creationism, quack medicine, opposition to vaccination, HIV/AIDS denialism, anti-psychiatry and so on.

Debunking Denialism takes on the enemies of reason.

Article Library

If you want to read more content from Debunking Denialism, check out the article library, or the main content below.

"I realize that 'complementary and alternative medicine' (CAM) or, what quackademics like to call it now, 'integrative medicine' (IM) is meant to refer to 'integrating' alternative therapies into SBM or 'complementing' SBM with a touch of the ol’ woo, but I could never manage to understand how 'integrating' quackery with SBM would do anything but weaken the scientific foundation of medicine."

- David Gorski, cancer surgeon and debunker of pseudoscience (source).

"Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster."

"If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven’t visited yet"

"As an aside, it is ironic that CAM proponents often simultaneously tout how individualized their treatment approach is, but then claim that one product or treatment can cure all cancer. Meanwhile they criticize the alleged cookie-cutter approach of mainstream medicine, which is actually producing a more and more individualized (and evidence-based) approach to such things as cancer."

- Steven Novella, neurologist and founder of the New England Skeptical Society. (source).

"Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufﬁcient to detect even rare associations. These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on more-promising leads."

"To me, skepticism is not believing what someone tells you, investigating all the information before coming to a conclusion. Skepticism is a good thing. Global warming skepticism is not that. It’s the complete opposite of that. It’s coming to a preconceived conclusion and cherry-picking the information that backs up your opinion. Global warming skepticism isn’t skepticism at all."

- John Cook, Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland (source).

“Rather than persisting in the view that they have been ‘rejected by science’, advocates in the cryptozoology community have more work to do in order to produce convincing evidence for anomalous primates and now have the means to do so. The techniques described here put an end to decades of ambiguity about species identification of anomalous primate samples and set a rigorous standard against which to judge any future claims."

“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”